People For the American Way

The Right’s 2012 Solution: “Just Close Your Eyes”

Last month, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett offered a solution for women who were going to be forced by the government to undergo a completely unnecessary ultrasound against their wills: "You can’t make anybody watch, okay? Because you just have to close your eyes." The governor’s suggestion would be almost comical, if it weren’t for the tragic fact that forcing women to watch was the whole point of the legislation Corbett supported.

But it seems that Corbett’s suggestion doesn’t just apply to women seeking abortions in the Keystone state. It is, in essence, what the GOP is telling to every woman turned off by the party’s attacks on reproductive rights, equal pay and domestic violence protections: "You just have to close your eyes."

Mitt Romney’s campaign is banking on the fact that voters of both genders are concerned about the economy in these uncertain times. Polls show that they’re right. But just because you’re concerned with the economy doesn’t mean you ignore it when a group of people are systematically taking away your rights for their own short-term political gain.

Sadly, this is the new normal. The Tea Party’s success has been based on this "just close your eyes" formula. Swept into power on a wave of economic dissatisfaction, Tea Party legislators in Washington and the states asked the country to "close its eyes" as it did everything but fix the economy. "Pay no attention while we roll back decades of progress everything else you care about. Just close your eyes while we bash immigrants, cut essential services, make it very hard to vote, and take away collective bargaining rights". Many minorities have been affected, particularly in the last two years, but arguably and amazingly, no group has been under attack more than the American majority–women.

A new report from People For the American Way investigates the new landscape that the Tea Party is creating for American women. Mississippi is set to become the only state in the country without a legal abortion clinic. Texas is on the path to denying reproductive health care to 130,000 low-income women. Wisconsin repealed its enforcement mechanism for equal pay lawsuits. Senate Republicans are fighting to stop the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Following an all-male panel speaking on women’s health, a woman who dares speak in front of Congress about the importance of affordable contraception is called a "slut."

Even with closed eyes, these things are very hard to miss. The Romney campaign has attempted to distract voters from this train wreck of anti-woman policies by claiming that a second Obama administration will hurt women economically. Last week, they hammered hard on the claim that women have accounted for 92 percent of job losses under President Obama- a mangled statistic that ignores, among other factors, that many of those losses were the result of Republican-led layoffs of teachers and other government employees. Then they decided to accuse Democrats of waging a "War on Moms" – forgetting, perhaps, the candidate’s history of aggressively pushing low-income women to work outside of the home when their children are very young.

Women haven’t bought it. In polls, Romney still trails Obama among women voters by double digits. And in an under-reported fact, among women ages 18 to 29, he’s losing by an astounding 45 points. You don’t need a political science degree that know that that spells disaster.

Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans seem to think they can get away with almost anything because, in the end, their Election Day hopes will be saved by a bad economy. The problem is, the people they attack on a regular basis – women, gays, Latinos, Muslims, you name it -know the Tea Party’s record on the economy and its history of cynical, culture-war attacks that deeply affect the lives of real people. We have our eyes wide open.